“If women’s rights were of genuine concern to EthicalOil.org” writes Adrangi, “then there would be a conversation about the impacts that tar sands extraction has on women”.

You’ll notice that Marshall’s attempted rebuttal fails to actually address the substantive criticisms made in Adrangi’s piece - Marshall never mentions the impacts of Alberta’s tar sands development on women, but instead repeats the same arguments and general hand-waving that sparked Adrangi’s criticism of EthicalOil.org's conservative pundits in the first place.

Marshall’s promotion of tar sands oil is framed around a central argument that if we care about women’s rights then we must support tar sands expansion, and by extension the Keystone XL pipeline, because Canadian women fare far better than women in petrocracies, such as Saudi Arabia. But Marshall’s argument doesn’t hold up to scrutiny for three major reasons.

The first is that increasing tar sands output will not hurt the Saudi sheiks' coffers. TransCanada’s own research proves that the Keystone XL pipeline was never meant to decrease our reliance on foreign oil, just to keep Gulf Coast refineries at capacity. As global demand for oil keeps going up, a marginal shift in Canadian and US consumption will be offset by growing demand from other countries, keeping prices high and continuing to enrich the oppressive Saudi regime. Expanding the tar sands just buys Saudi Arabia a bit more time to profit before we are compelled to shift away from oil addiction towards a clean energy future - the real 'ethical' choice.

This leads to the second major flaw in Ethicaloil.org’s argument: it presents the reader with a false choice. Marshall’s bait-and-switch suggests that we must make a choice between “conflict oil” and “ethical oil”. On the contrary, you can simultaneously support women’s rights and oppose Alberta’s tar sands. The two aren’t mutually exclusive, to say the least. If we really want to hurt the regimes of oppressive petrocracies, then the wise choice is to end our addiction to fossil fuels and move rapidly towards a clean energy economy, setting a model that the rest of the world can follow. EthicalOil.org's entire line of reasoning is a diversionary tactic designed to obscure this hard reality. It's a red herring, and a dangerous one at that.

Third, Marshall’s emotional appeal tells readers that because women’s rights are worse in petrocracries, then we needn’t concern ourselves with what’s happening in Canada. In Canada, we have female mayors and premiers. We are a liberal democratic nation that respects human rights. I agree that the plight of women in many petrocracies is grave, but that does not mean that the plight of many women in Canada deserves less consideration from Canadians.

We can and should engage in critical discussions on women’s rights in Canada. And tar sands expansion forces us to explore some of these issues head-on.

In Alberta’s tar sands region in particular, rates of sexual violence towards women have increased and women working in the industry have reported sexual harassment and gender discrimination. With expansion of the tar sands industry, instances of domestic violence in Fort McMurray have spiralled upwards, and few women have safe places to go, forcing many to return home to their abusers.

Instead of pretending that expanding the tar sands will somehow help women in Saudi Arabia, let's talk about how we can help Canadian women impacted right here at home by tar sands expansion.

Marshall boldly demands to know where Canadian women’s groups have been in speaking out against Saudi women’s oppression. Did she ever think to ask these groups? I did. For one, Jan Slakov, the National Secretary for Canadian Voices of Women for Peace, the organization that Marshall attacks in her piece, told me,

“The Canadian Voice of Women for Peace has worked to support women's rights and well-being, not just in Canada, but around the world. Groups have raised funds to support programs in countires where women face systematic human rights abuses. We also work at the international level to support women's rights through the UN.”

As a Women’s Studies graduate, Marshall should know that Canadian women's rights groups are engaged in this fight directly. Instead, Marshall, while claiming to be an advocate of women’s rights, erases the history of the women’s rights movement in Canada and its work in global solidarity with women living under oppressive regimes. I can’t speak for women’s groups, but I think it’s telling that we haven’t heard any credible organizations supporting EthicalOil.org’s message. I suspect they see right through EthicalOil.org’s insincere issue hijacking.

Slakov notes that women's organizations are engaged in promoting a clean energy future while advocating women's rights. She told DeSmogBlog:

“We recognize that extreme weather events associated with climate change disproportionately affect women, especially in the world's poorest countries. This is one of the many reasons why we feel it is essential that Canada do its part to cut GHG emissions to the earth's atmosphere.”

Marshall's attempts to disparage Canadian women's rights groups proves Maryam Adrangi’s point: “When we get attention, they get defensive and they look silly.”

Given this, it's clear whose interests she's chiefly representing, and it isn't women's rights. It's the oil industry and its status quo profiteering without regard to the impacts of pollution on our planet, our familes and especially our women.

Ethicaloil.org, if you really care about women’s rights, how about engaging in a real discussion of the impacts of the tar sands on First Nations communities and women? Prove you’re engaged in the advancement of women’s rights by joining the conversation about how to actually challenge oppressive Saudi sheiks –through a transition to a clean energy future.

Comments

Ethical Oil needs to be called on their position GHG emissions. Just the other day, Marshall repeated the canard that oil sands emissions are “only” 5% of Canada’s total emissions. In fact, they are now at 7% and risng fast. Yet Alykhan Velshi’s “Myths and Lies” piece on oil sands GHGs actually claimed that emissions were going down!

Even worse, much of Velshi’s and Levant’s downplaying of the oil sands’ carbon footprint trots out tired “skeptic” arguments, such as the claim that up to 95% of atmospheric CO2 is “natural”, dwarfing human emissions. Together with Levant’s more explicit anti-science pronouncements from a few years back, there is little doubt that Ethical Oil is just another industry-friendly “skeptic” group, albeit with a new framing of the issues as a distraction.

Kathryn Marshall used similar techniques in responding to a Science Matters column David Suzuki wrote about “ethical oil” (which was published in almost all of Postmedia’s papers even though they didn’t publish the original Suzuki article). She seized on a relatively minor point in the article (Canada’s rejection of its Kyoto commitments) and ignored the overall substance of the article, including all the impacts of the tar sands. She then concluded from this that David Suzuki is guilty of moral relativism when it is clearly the “ethical oil” argument that resorts to moral relativism. It would have been laughable except that it illustrates the support for industry and this bogus argument from mainstream media. Of course, Marshall is from the Fraser Institute, which has close ties with Postmedia.

I really like this piece Emma. You use good common sense to dispell and unravell Marshall’s claims. My favourite line is “you can simultaneously support women’s rights and oppose Alberta’s tar sands”. It’s a no brainer.

When I first heard about “Ethical Oil” I was thinking it was non-GMO, organic local cooking oil or something, then I learned that the term was being used to refer to canada’s toxic tar sands I was totally taken aback. Do the spin doctors and oil executives think that the canadian and american public is stupid?!?

Way to go Emma, keep writing about these issues please, give us a piece of your mind and put crazy people like Marshall in their place!

“I guess now we know what the real comment policy is here, as opposed to the one which they have posted.”

The comment policy is very specific & it’s clear you haven’t read it.

"Fossil-fuel companies have spent millions funding anti-global-warming think tanks, purposely creating a climate of doubt around the science. DeSmogBlog is the antidote to that obfuscation." ~ BRYAN WALSH, TIME MAGAZINE